How to tame Lightning Paw

There’s a new spirit beast to tame in patch 7.1.5! Lightning Paw is the first spirit beast fox and he has a unique lightning effect not seen on any other beasts. It’s hard to see this in screenshots, so check out the short video clip embedded below. Somehow, we all missed him on the PTR (too busy bickering over class mechanics I think), but someone discovered him by chance and posted in the Wowhead comments earlier today.

The first hint that he exists comes from a new NPC in Trueshot Lodge, Watcher Danuser(side note: this NPC is named after the designer who implemented Lightning Paw, Steve Danuser, who also mentioned his daughter came up with the idea for this pet). He is from the Night Watch in Duskwood, and when you talk to him he mentions stalking creatures with “beady little eyes, peering at you from the bushes.” You can find this NPC sitting next to the target dummies in the lodge. With that little hint, head off to Duskwood.

All around Duskwood are bushes with creepy little flashing eyes. It appears that Lightning Paw has a chance to spawn inside any some of these bushes. He is in stealth, so you need to reveal him by either standing very close (be sure to enable your Track Hidden for extra stealth detection), or dropping a flare. Since Flare has a cooldown, it’s a lot faster to fly from bush to bush, land in the middle of it, and see if you hear the stealth sound. If you do, drop your flare and you should see him. He is non-aggressive until you begin taming.

See those eyes?

You can find many of these bushes around the cemetery on the western side of the zone. Not every single bush can spawn him, but these are some coordinates of known spawn points (the /way is for easy copy pasting into the Tomtom addon):

As for respawn time, we don’t know yet. Judging from what I’ve seen from other Hunters who’ve tamed him, I would guess the respawn time is not too long, and the challenge is finding a bush where he is up.

Lightning Paw scales to your character level, all the way down to level 17, so even low level Hunters can tame him.

How does pet taming work with all the realm crossing? If there is a guy from a different realm with me in the same bush, will it spawn for both of us? Or are we now competing for one pet across all the realms?

Got him on Maganis 9am using /tar lightning paw macro. 1 fly around daily at the same time hopping from bush to bush around the perimeter of the area while mounted but on the ground standing in the middle of each bush. Happy hunting! 2 weeks at 10 minutes a day.

Took about 10 minutes of concerted effort to find this guy on Anvilmar. Got close to a bush, didn’t see any eyes, but I did notice strange lightning sparks emanating from it. Dropped a flare and there he was. Lovely pet. Found him in a bush just SE of Addle’s Stead.

I saw on another forum that Lightning Paw doesn’t have the heal if you tame him below level 20 (makes sense). Does anyone know whether he “learns” the heal skill if he levels up to 20 after being tamed? Thanks!